My colleague Kristen Convery recently shared a post that outlines what her team looks for when determining osu.edu stories. There was a lot of good stuff in there and it got me thinking about what makes a good story for Ohio State Alumni Magazine.

Before I go further I’ll say that many items Kristen mentioned apply perfectly to what we’d seek in a good magazine feature. All of our stories should advance awareness of the great academic and research achievements happening on campus as well as supporting the university’s national reputation. We aren’t doing our job if we don’t share that type of content with readers.

But there are some areas where a print publication that’s delivered six times a year is going to be naturally different than a digital platform. With that said, I’ll move onto three items we consider when deciding if a story is a good fit for the magazine.

• Broad appeal: The magazine audience is as widely varied as you will find. Our readers come from every college and major and graduated in many different decades. To that end, we are always looking for stories that have broad appeal and matter to people of varied backgrounds. When considering stories I often ask the question, “If I had no connection to Ohio State, is this a story I would be interested in?” If the answer is yes, then that’s a good sign we may have a winner on our hands.
• Results matter: A story that can clearly illustrate positive outcomes from a university effort is going to merit consideration. We live in a results-oriented society, so any time we can show how the university’s work is producing positive and quantifiable results it’s a plus. And tying back to broad appeal, the more wide-ranging the impact the better.
• Take them back: Alumni magazine readers by and large have favorable memories of their times on campus. A recent magazine reader survey indicated that two of the most popular reader topics are institutional history and traditions and campus facilities and growth. Simply put, readers love it when the magazine can be a vehicle that transports them back to campus and reminds them of their time here. As a rule, we want the magazine to be forward looking, but with an alumni audience we’d be ignoring the obvious if we don’t look back every now and then.

Those are some of the items we consider when evaluating a story’s potential for inclusion in the magazine. With all of that said, there is no exact formula for what is going to be in each edition. Sometimes you get a great idea that doesn’t fit the above criteria but is interesting enough on its own that it merits a story. And you also want to keep your readers surprised and guessing, so zagging when they expect a zig can have some value, too. As long as you are keeping the readers’ interest at the forefront of your decisions, you really can’t go wrong.

A few weeks ago I mentioned we were in the process of conducting a survey of Ohio State Alumni Magazine readers. The survey itself (which was conducted using the CASE magazine survey template) is just another piece of the groundwork we’re doing to set the foundation for the overall magazine re-design scheduled for completion in November.

I want to emphasize the survey is just one piece of information we are considering as we examine ways to make the magazine better. No one piece of data is going to entirely direct our thinking, because it’s important to assess a wide range of inputs before moving forward. And I think that survey results can be misleading in some cases. From my time in newspapers I know that what readers say they want in a survey does not always square with reader behavior measured by pageviews to particular stories. So the proverbial grain of salt is in play here.

With that said, it is always good to take the temperature of your readership to see where they say they stand. We had 1,229 respondents, 59 percent male and 41 percent female. The age of participants skewed to the older end with 75 percent of respondents aged 50 or older. To take a closer look at some information from the survey, you can review a presentation I shared Wednesday with our UC editorial staff: OSAM readership survey.

I don’t believe we discovered anything terribly earth-shattering in the results. Readers generally have a favorable view of the magazine and think it is fairly objective when reporting on the university. There were a few items that did pique my interest, however.

In the quantitative portion of the survey many readers indicated they are interested in coverage of athletics. However in the qualitative portion many felt that there is too much athletics coverage. Our recent magazine content audit indicates that athletic content makes up less than 10 percent of all content, so perception may differ from reality here. It’s also possible that readers are taking ads into consideration when assessing overall content, and many ads that appear in the magazine have an athletic theme.

Another piece of info that was interesting to me is that more than 85 percent of respondents said they are very or somewhat interested in content that covers the changing landscape of higher education. I’ve always felt this type of story was more internal than external, but many in our audience want this type of information. This makes some sense since many of our readers likely have kids or grandkids who want to attend college some day. In that regard, I’ve adjusted my thinking on our coverage. It isn’t navel gazing, but instead practical and useful news that has a real-life influence on peoples’ lives. Color me better informed.

The survey itself gives us a nice snapshot of our readership and will be helpful going forward. If you’re interested in taking a look at the full report, just contact me via email and I’d be happy to share.